Crisis of Brilliance- the Show of the Book

Dulwich Gallery is staging a rather intriguing exhibition at the moment.   Entitled “A Crisis of Brilliance”, it in effects sets out to provide a fuller visual accompaniment to the book of that title by David Boyd Haycock than he was able to do in the confines of a “normal”, non-coffee-table, book.    It this he set out to tell the entwined stories of six artists- Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Richard Nevinson, Dora Carrinbgton, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg- in the wider context of the London art world in the years before, during and immediately after the First World War.   All six attended the Slade School of Art for a greater or lesser period before the War; all were taught by the moving spirit behind that School in those years, Henry Tonks.   All were to a greater or lesser extent shaped by the time at the Slade and by the War.

It’s a really interesting and well written book about a more than averagely interesting (if not always likeable) group of people, with an intriguing supporting cast like John Currie, a highly talented contemporary and associate of the chosen six who shot his model/lover and then committed suicide just before the outbreak of the War, and Isaac Rosenberg, another Slade alumnus now better remembered as a poet killed in action in 1918 (and incidentally one of the very few War Poets who wasn’t of at least middle class origins and didn’t serve as an officer).   I’m not going to try to summarise its content; I’d advise anybody who takes an interest in the art of this period to read Haycock.   For the purposes of this blog I’m just going to focus on a few points which particularly struck or interested me.

The first of these was just how conservative the Slade actually was by about 1910.   It had a considerable reputation for being a progressive sort of place artistically and maybe by comparison with other art schools in London and beyond it was.   It had certainly been very much in the forefront of art education in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century.   The problem, I suppose, was that the same progressive young(ish) men who had been in charge back then were still dominant twenty odd years later and, like many old radicals, had become a new establishment almost without realising it themselves.  Tonks was a particularly egregious example here.   He was a huge champion of drawing skills, particularly of the ability to draw the human body in an anatomically correct fashion.   As a result he had no sympathy or understanding of students who weren’t so hot at drawing the human figure- his negative criticism of Nash, who was never at his best drawing people, virtually hounded the young man out of art altogether.  It was no thanks to the Slade (which he left after less than a year) that he discovered his true talent as a painter of landscapes.

Tonks was also violently hostile to just about every development in modern art in Continental Europe postdating Impressionism.   He was driven to fury by the two major shows of “Post Impressionist” art staged by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912 and made it abundantly clear that he would have much preferred it had his students not visited them.   He can hardly have been happy that Spencer actually exhibited in the second one.   While there’s a case to be made that Fry was motivated as much by self- aggrandisement and the profit motive (a good going scandal was guaranteed to pull in the crowds) as a genuine desire to bring the wonders of modern art to the benighted heathen of London, it was a remarkably inward looking attitude. Obviously Tonks was a hardly alone in his views, which were shared by most- though not all- of the British media and art establishment of the day, but it left him aligned with the sort of people he wouldn’t normally have given the time of day to.

Of course the sextet in question all defined his wishes and in their different ways became deeply involved in the deeply fissiparous and quarrelsome little world of modernist art, London style.   The route to modernism wasn’t always linear.  It often took a dog-leg through early Renaissance Italy- an earlier Renaissance than that championed by Tonks, treating Piero della Francesco as an end rather than a start point.   In Spencer’s case that influence never entirely left him.  Others took modernism even further than Fry.  Nevinson, for instance, became England’s only fully paid up, card carrying, Futurist- literally banging the bass drum for that Italian import at the rowdy and chaotic Futurist “happenings” presided over by F T Marinetti.   Tonks must have had conniptions…..    Predictably Nevinson overplayed his hand by signing up a slew of his artistic friends to an English Futurist manifesto nominally co-authored with Marinetti without bothering to consult them. After much sound and fury (not just verbal- there was at least one outright punch-up at an exhibition…) Vorticism was dreamed up as a suitably English counter-movement to Futurism but itself proved a fractious and fissiparous affair.  Personal issues further complicated artistic alignments; Gertler and Nevinson had a major falling out because both seriously fancied Dora Carrington.    Gertler won that contest, at least in the short term.  

Looking at the art the chosen six produced in this period, however, it’s abundantly clear that much of the shouting and name calling was a case of the fetishism of microscopic differences.  Bomberg’s “The Hold” pictured at the top of this piece is about as Futurist a piece as one might hope to encounter (and a good deal closer in style and approach to the art of Severini or Boccioni than anything Nevinson was doing at the time).  It certainly reduced the “Jewish Chronicle” to baffled incomprehension- and given that both Bomberg and Gertler were only able to attend the Slade because they were beneficiaries of scholarships awarded to promising Jewish artists that paper’s views mattered.   Gertler’s relatively conservative portraits of family members and East End rabbis, though only partially representing his own preferences, were much more to the taste of the board which managed the bequest which paid his fees- and of Tonks.    The rather odd picture of apple harvesters below would just about have passed muster as well, with its clear echoes of classical and Renaissance art (though I have to admit I find it rather lumpish and slightly creepy).

One can only speculate how the artistic and personality issues would have played out had war not come in 1914.   It’s a pretty obvious truism that this deeply marked the lives of all six.   Intriguingly the only one to be part of the rush of volunteers to the colours in September 1914 was Bomberg, who was initially rejected by the army (evidently the recruiting officers didn’t quite know what to do with a rather hairy Jewish artist…).   Admittedly none of the men (apart perhaps from Nash, whose later health issues appear to have been at least in part a consequence of war injuries) were prime recruiting candidates.  Spencer only just scraped the minimum height requirements; Nevinson and Gertler both had serious health problems.    

Despite his health problems, Nevinson was the first to get to the Front.   He, more than most, ought to have had some idea what he was letting himself in for as his father was a notable newspaper war correspondent.   Nevertheless his Futurist principles meant that intellectually he approved of war as a form of social hygiene and felt he should live up to his principles by taking part.   Somewhat ironically he volunteered for service with the Friends’ Ambulance Service, established and largely staffed by Quaker pacifists who wished to do humanitarian work (mostly with the French forces, whose medical services were initially overwhelmed by the scale of casualties).   This evidently made for some lively discussions between Nevinson and his colleagues, though it’s fair to say that Nevinson’s own views shifted to and fro several times once he had been exposed to the realities of war.

Predictably his health broke down and he ended up back in London- with what was at that point a rather unique artistic insight into what was going on at the Front.   Being well connected and having a true Futurist instinct for self- publicty he was well able to take advantage of this situation.   He produced a series of much admired canvases including the one below showing the ghastly situation in an overcrowded and improvised French field hospital (contrary to what is sometimes claimed,  pictorial material which sought to show the full horrors of the war was never subject to state censorship in First World War Britain).  Even his modernist style found favour in unexpected quarters as in some way an appropriate response to a new, technological, style of warfare; senior generals went into print to praise his work.  For a brief moment Nevinson was arguably the most famous and most highly regarded contemporary artist in Britain. 

Inevitably the war impacted on all six artists.   The upper middle class Nash joined up as an infantry officer, the less socially prominent Bomberg and Spencer went into the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Medical Corps respectively.   Nash’s front line service was brief; he was invalided out after falling into a shell hole and seriously damaging his ribs.  Bomberg self-wounded and was very lucky not to be detected- he could easily have faced a firing squad otherwise.  Spencer ended up in the mountains of the Macedonian Front (where my grandfather served- I wonder if they ever met).  Gertler became a Conscientious Objector (though he can’t have been as absolutist in his views as some, since he went through with the medical examination which accompanied the establishment of conscription in Britain in 1916, duly failed it, and never appears to have had to go before a tribunal to justify his position).   Unlike many young women, Carrington was just about well enough off not to have to go into war work to support herself, though the war hit her as hard as any through the loss of a brother to whom she had been very close.  There was enough of a well-heeled progressive anti-war counter-culture to provide a support network and commissions for Gertler; Carrington’s profound lack of artistic self confidence limited her output.  She also eventually dumped Gertler in favour of the writer Lytton Strachey- a somewhat improbable relationship given that he was notoriously gay, though Carrington was herself bisexual and as a relationship it clearly worked- at least on some levels.

Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of the war from a purely artistic point of view was the massive expansion of state patronage which it offered both during and in the immediate aftermath of hostilities.  One major aspect of this was the establishment of a formal “War Artist” scheme which recruited artists and paid them to produce war-related art.  Those who went to the Front were given commissioned officer status and a fairly free rein- though subjects were sometimes suggested.   Though the “top management” of the scheme were artists of an older and more conservative generation, there was absolutely no control over painting style and modernists were welcome to apply.  This proved a godsend for men like Nash and Nevinson whose health-based exemptions from further service were beginning to look tenuous as the pressure to find men for the Front mounted in 1917.  They could now serve under conditions of their own choosing.   This didn’t necessarily mean sitting in safe rear areas- Nash in particular used his skills as a landscape artist to depict the sheer devastation of the Ypres salient in a series of powerful works.  

It was however probably safer than being an infantry subaltern with a theoretical average life expectancy of six weeks.   Even Gertler found merit in the scheme on corporatist grounds (as favouring younger artists) and was initially prepared to participate, though he finally backed out because he found he couldn’t create something that satisfied him with the topic he had been pointed towards (people sheltering from air raids).  

Not everybody was included in the scheme straight away.  Spencer, far away in Macedonia, was initially overlooked and (having transferred to the infantry) faced combat in the final weeks of the war.   He was eventually included, though this did not speed up his demobilisation, which was only expedited when he went down with malaria.  Nevertheless his work was part of the immediate post-war exhibitions of art created under the scheme, most of which now reside in the Imperial War Museum (sadly Spencer’s wonderful painting of army mules watching as the wounded are treated in a field hospital in a strange inversion of a traditional Nativity scene wasn’t loaned to Dulwich).     

Other opportunities briefly opened up in the immediate post war period.   One doesn’t normally think of Lord Beaverbrook- newspaper tycoon and Conservative politician- as a patron of modernist art but in his role as head of Canada’s planned memorialisation of its role in the war he handed out commissions to Bomberg and other modernists.  Unfortunately for Bomberg, his first effort depicting Canadian sappers tunnelling under Hill 60 near St Eloi (see below) drew violent negative reactions from the committee managing the project.  He managed to rework the piece in a way which suited their susceptibilities but the incident left him scarred.   Muirhead Bone, who had been a senior figure in the War Artist scheme, then advised Bomberg that he would struggle to find sales for his works given the style in which he painted.  Bone was highly conservative in his own approach but he had a keen sense of the Zeitgeist.   Even in Paris, capital of the international avant garde, the talk was of “return to order” and neo-classicism- there were even rather bizarre attempts to argue that modernist styles were in some way “Teutonic” and therefore tainted.   Bone suggested that Bomberg might apply for a job as Official Artist to the nascent Zionist settler movement in Palestine.   As a result he disappeared from the mainstream of British and European art for a couple of decades; on his return he was more valued as a teacher than as an artist in his own right and his early works have only been fully rediscovered recently.

The other five enjoyed varied fates.  Gertler never quite found a solid footing in the post war art world and was doomed to be seen as someone who had not really fulfilled his early promise.  The works shown in Dulwich (which admittedly exclude some of his best paintings) suggest that even then he struggled to develop a truly consistent personal style.  Impoverished, marginalised and ailing, he committed suicide at the outbreak of the Second World War.   Carrington’s diffidence about her art became ever more overpowering, not helped by a complex private life spread between Strachey and a series of lovers of both sexes.   She more or less gave up art altogether and when Strachey died in 1931 she chose to take her own life.  

Nash’s war landscapes established him as a major figure in British art, a status which he enjoyed for the rest of his life.   Best remembered for his landscapes, he also dabbled in his own brand of Surrealism and lived to see service again as a war artist in the Second World War where he painted the vapour trails of aerial dogfights and downed German bombers being absorbed into the English countryside.   Nevinson, by contrast, never regained the status he briefly held during the war.  His post-war works were, to put it charitably, of variable quality- as in truth his war time works were also (there is, for instance, an unpleasant undercurrent of misogyny and possibly anti-Semitism in some of the pieces he produced away from the Front in this period).    He tried and failed to break into the American market and ended his days a half-forgotten figure.  It is an irony that a small number of his works from his fifteen minutes of fame have now acquired iconic status, visual clichés for the covers of books about the First World War.

Spencer had always been a sturdy individualist, deeply rooted in the Thames-side rural village of Cookham where he was born (it’s revealing that his nickname at the Slade was “Cookham”).   This was a more remote place in the 1900s than it looks on the map and Spencer’s upbringing in a highly religious family perhaps made it even more remote from the everyday world in mental terms.   Spencer retained a deep, mystical and rather unorthodox Christian faith throughout his life.  Like the fifteenth century Italians he admired, his art was always open to the possibility that the physical and spiritual worlds might intertwine in unexpected ways and that major events of biblical history could play out in the streets of Cookham.   In the picture below, Jesus carries his cross through the village, with the spectators looking out from upstairs windows doubling as the heavenly host and the pointed railings serving as an echo of the spears of the Roman legionaries doing crowd control duties on the way to Calvary.  The men carrying the ladders to assist in the Crucifixion look like a couple of local painters and decorators borrowed to take part in an event which transcends them.   Time and again throughout his career Spencer would project the great events of Christian history and anchor them in the village of his birth.   

Like Nash, Spencer lived to see artistic service in the Second World War.  His area of activity was far away from rural Cookham, in the Clydeside shipyards.  There he drew the workers toiling in the noise and ordered confusion of shipbuilding.   His work there was something of a throwback to the days of careful figure drawing at the Slade- Tonks would have thoroughly approved.